***I have cross-posted this to "General Discussion" because I think the article makes important points, and I want to make it visible even for people who never come to the "Good Reads" forum. BTW, the commentary from The Young Turks that comprises much of the length of this embedded video is also excellent and worth watching, but the video itself is only few minutes long at the start of the longer video, and it ends at the 1:37 mark, in case you don't want to commit to watching the entire 11:57 of the commentary.

America loves helping the shoeless, iphoneless, voteless, bug-infested Street Jesuses. These are the lost-cause poor; all they want is your pocket change. (Bless their hearts.) But the working poor? Those who claim to not have enough money for food because they also need clothes for work, water for bathing and laundry, rent for housing, heat in the winter, money for daycare, a smartphone for their job, car insurance and gas ó those are some shifty motherfuckers.

If youíre on food stamps America has every right to hate you, as evidenced by this angry conservative yelling at a father and child for using food stamps. This lady proves conservatives love a good hate like they love a good steak. I assume she thinks of herself as a nice person, a good person, a church-goer. We all think everyone else is the asshole, right? There isnít a lot of self-directed road rage out there. How often do we key our own cars? Itís always okay to hate the other guy when the hate is justified ó like child predators, rapists, and food stamp users.

SNIP

Donít confuse aid with charity. Charity is old coats. Donating a coat doesnít make you a good person but I bet it makes you feel like one. You didnít even want that coat anymore, what you wanted was the closet space. Sure, you could have sold it at a garage sale and made, like, twenty bucks. It was an expensive coat, damn it. But you, with your heart of gold, gave it away. Thereís a twinkle in Godís eye just for you.

SNIP

Vote for a Living Wage for others. Vote for health insurance for others. Donít get in the way of food stamps for others.Understand how important $17 might be to others. That poor stretch of Atlanta is quiet because people are working and paying for day care. Theyíre clocking the same hours youíre clocking, but they make a shit wage.

afford the lawsuits the Phelpses will file. The reason Fred had his kids become lawyers is that suing people whose buttons they press enough to goad them into doing something that even slightly crosses the line is a (perhaps THE) major source of their funding.

The LA taxpayers will have to pay again for this fool's grandstanding.

Wow! I was just looking out the window while on the phone, when I spotted FOUR gorgeous young hawks, each about the size of a cat (though undoubtedly not as heavy!), standing in a fairly tight group in my back yard. They just stood there looking around, then looking at each other, then looking around some more, like a bunch of confused kids who were curious but not at all clear about what they were supposed to do or where they were supposed to o.

After several minutes, they all flew to sit in a row on my neighborís tall wooden fence (see picture, which shows 3 of them), with about a about the same amount of space between each two birds.

They sat that way for a while (and I took some useless, too far away pics and video while they did so, for fear of scaring them away if I tried to get closer), and then one flew to a tree nearby. Then another flew to the same tree, and then another, leaving just one on the fence.

I am thinking maybe they were fledglings that were hatched in the tree they all decamped to.

But how cool it was to see them standing there together for so long in my back yard, no more than 10 feet away from where I watched at my window.